


Comfortably Numb

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:23:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezekiel finds an impediment to his mission and tries to solve it.  This proves to be more difficult than it should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comfortably Numb

**Author's Note:**

> This is in response to the anonymous tumblr prompt: "Creepzekiel visits Sam in his dreams." 
> 
> Also, I do not like the creepy angel.
> 
> Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property. I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.

“Just a little pin prick 

There’ll be no more AAAAAHHHH 

But you may feel a little sick.”

-Pink Floyd

-Comfortably Numb

Ezekiel did not generally understand dreams, because he was an angel. Angels by definition do not sleep. At present, though, the nature of his injuries combined with his need for concealment and the frankly dire situation of his current vessel to make sleep a reality for him or at least force him to comply with the vessel’s needs. He had anticipated this when making his plan to subsume himself within the Winchester. He had known not to expect sunshine and rainbows, of course. The abomination’s life had not been easy. However, he had counted on the vessel getting sufficient sleep for both their needs and getting that rest in sufficient chunks for optimum health, not in thirty to ninety minute bursts of torment and rehashed trauma that would have made Ezekiel’s hair turn white. If he’d had hair, that was, which as a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent he did not. 

He tolerated the nightmares for several weeks, expecting that they would be simply the response of a shocked subconscious to becoming the unwilling vessel for an angel. He supposed that the human would calm down once he adjusted to the angel’s presence. After dozens of nights of reliving the man’s agonies in the Cage or watching his loved ones die or sitting through his brother calling him a monster and a vampire he finally grew tired of it. Perhaps it was the man’s taint responding to his grace, throwing up all of these horrors as a kind of out-of-control immune response. Whatever the cause, it was impeding his ability to heal the Winchester, which was in turn impeding his ultimate mission and could therefore not be tolerated. The burns to his inside simply wouldn’t heal on their own, he had to actively manipulate each tiny sub-atomic particle and the more exhausted they both were the less inclined those particles were to stay healed. Finally he decided to put a stop to it.

He had not wanted to interact with the Winchester directly, lest he recognize what had happened to him and eject him forcibly, but he saw no other viable options at this point. One night while the man was struggling with sleep he grabbed him from a nightmare – a Cage memory, in fact, so Ezekiel was especially keen to interpose himself. He reached out with his Grace and pulled the man off the meat hooks, separating him from a memory of Michael and an angel blade the size of a paring knife, and set him down in a room. Ezekiel had gone to great lengths to find this room in the blasted, twisted landscape of Sam Winchester’s psyche and had to confess to a certain amount of pride as he stood before the man’s image. 

Ezekiel wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from his new vessel. He’d received some intelligence from the angels who had interacted with him, but very few of Heaven’s host had ever really given the younger Winchester much attention. They usually regretted that decision if very briefly. His first clue that he might need to tread carefully around the abomination came when the maimed and bloodied figure before him straightened up, looked down at himself, blinked and was clad. The blood and guts disappeared and he had the appearance in the dreamscape that he had in the waking world. Ezekiel hadn’t done that; he wouldn’t have seen the point. “Who are you?” Sam demanded in a quiet voice.

“I am here to help you,” the angel told him.

Few muscles moved – only the ones he actually needed, and in this case all he needed were the muscles to move the corner of his lip up into a smirk. “Right. And what would an angel be doing in my dreams again?” His soft voice tripped across the ear like a predator’s. His arms hung by his sides, not limp but coiled and ready. 

Ezekiel frowned. “You are mistrustful. Intelligence suggested you bore a previous bias toward the heavenly host.”

He gave a little huff of laughter or something like it. “Your intelligence was wrong. Maybe once, but once your little buddies left Dean alone with Alistair and let him get hospitalized I guess the bloom fell off the rose.” A vase of roses appeared on a shelf of archive boxes and then promptly withered and died.

Ezekiel stepped forward. “How did you do that?”

“They’re my dreams. It’s hardly the first dream-walk I’ve been on. You still haven’t explained why you’re here, in my dream, poking around in a storage room filled with what look like they’re probably my memories.”

“You already know they’re your memories.” This was probably not going to go the way he wanted. Ezekiel hadn’t exactly gained a huge amount of experience with humans or vessels but he was pretty sure that most of them weren’t quite as astute as the Winchester.

“We’re in my head, they’re filed according to my filing system – do NOT touch that,” he barked as Ezekiel reached out to grab at a box. “I only just put them back in order after the stupid trials. Geez, were you raised in the barn part of Heaven? Anyway, they’re filed according to my filing system and I don’t know of too many other people whose memory archives would contain five thousand years’ worth of Enochian labels.” He gestured at one large section of shelving, distinguished from the rest of the room by a circle of dust. “Plus there’s the remains of the wall death put up. Did your intelligence also try to tell you that I had the IQ of a crushed snail? Because I really gotta say, your intelligence service isn’t impressing me much here. Now tell me who you are before I send you back where you came from.” 

The angel repressed a grimace. He could only hope that Sam’s illness and his own concealment would prevent the mortal from realizing just what the implications of that statement were. “I am an angel, Sam,” he pointed out, trusting to the awe factor or at least the fear factor. 

He was met again with that little smirk. “So is Lucifer.” Ezekiel went cold suddenly, which had probably been the goal. “Now tell me, what is it that you actually want and who you are.”

He supposed that it wouldn’t harm anything to give his name. It wasn’t as though he had any intention of letting the vessel remember this encounter. “My name is Ezekiel. My purpose is to assist you – to heal you, Sam Winchester. But I have met with very limited success over several weeks and I am afraid that I must now enlist your aid.”

“Why would an angel want to help me?” More than one angel had told him of the wonder that the boy had displayed when discussing them, or when an angel took notice of him at all. He supposed that had been some time ago, before Lucifer rose. Any wonder had been replaced with disgust. 

“You were badly damaged during the trials. Your brother was forced to take drastic action – me – to heal you. I still don’t know if I will be successful or the extent to which I will be able to repair you, but I am doing what I can. In order to be healed you must rest.” 

“I can follow your logic so far.” Long arms crossed his broad chest. He could almost pass for casual the way Ezekiel could almost pass for Sam sometimes.

“Nightmares are not restful sleep. You require long periods of continuous sleep, not short bursts of sleep punctuated by screaming in dead or nonhuman languages.” 

The abomination considered it. “Hm. I suppose that makes sense.” He shrugged.

“I have made a study of your dreams and they seem to consist entirely of memories,” Ezekiel pressed. Intimidating the Winchester hadn’t worked but then again, the man had bested Lucifer in a battle of wills. Perhaps reason would work after all. “I require you to find the happy memories in your files so that you may dream about them instead of the bad ones.” 

The Winchester burst out laughing, laughing so hard that he actually doubled over. Ezekiel found himself struck by the way the man looked when he laughed, even though he could not quite understand what was so very funny about his request. He’d phrased it simply enough. Years – at least a decade – melted from his face. “Right. I’m not entirely sure how to break it to you, Ezekiel, but there really aren’t any.”

“Every human has some good memories, Sam. We have to find them. They make up your Heaven, after all.”

The mirth died away. “You’re not dumb enough to think I’m actually going back there, are you? That whole thing was such a mess – engineered from the start by that supercreep Zachariah to drive Dean and me further apart. It worked, too,” he muttered, looking away for a moment.

“But there were good memories to include,” he tried. He tried to remember back to the Winchesters’ heaven. Come to think of it, the “Sam” parts had seemed rather half-finished.

“Sure. And that’s when I found out that the things that I counted as wins got Dean beat to hell by our dad. That the things that made me feel good were so hurtful to Dean that he was willing to end the world over them.” He straightened himself up. “Now every time I think of Stanford – not just that night, the night I escaped, but the whole time I was there – I remember how Dean will always hate me for it, just a little. How every time I had a moment of privacy there, how every exam I aced or every paper I got back with an A, was nothing more than a stab in the back for my brother. And of course my being there at all was what caused Brady to get possessed and Jess to get murdered so there’s that. If I hadn’t been there they’d have lived long, happy, healthy lives. The other good memory of mine that made it up there – the Flagstaff escape? Yeah, turns out Dad took it out on Dean and he took it out on him with a vengeance. So not only did Dean hate me for even having that memory but the whole experience got him hurt.

“I don’t actually know you, Ezekiel. I don’t know how much you know about Hell or the Cage or about your big brothers. Time moves differently in the Cage than it does on Earth. Three minutes on Earth is like a week down there. So if you add up the time my soul spent down there solo with the time the rest of me was there, we’re looking at about five thousand years. And Lucifer, unlike you, didn’t need a librarian for the archives here. Do you really think that, assuming that there was a single memory that made it through that whole Heaven fiasco, that I managed to keep secret from Dean through that whole mess and that hadn’t been somehow arranged or engineered by demons, that Lucifer and Michael wouldn’t have found a way to crap all over it in five thousand years?”

Ezekiel paused. “I will consider what you have said, Sam Winchester.”

“Yeah, okay. You do that. While you consider, how about you tell me exactly why an angel is interested in healing someone like me.” 

“It was at your brother’s request. He was very persuasive.” Surely this would be enough for the man. After all, he knew how Dean could get when his life was at stake. All of Heaven knew it. 

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. Studied torture in Hell, Alistair’s right-hand man, I got all the memos. But that doesn’t explain why you’d be keen to get involved. I mean, the Apocalypse is over. The Cage can’t be opened, because the final seal is gone. So there’s no more need for an abomination like me, so there’s no more need to keep me walking around. And since the Cage can’t be opened there’s no more use for Lucifer’s vessel. So… why?”

“We had a mission once,” the angel told him. “We were supposed to be the guardians of our Father’s creation. Some of us still believe in that mission. Like Castiel.” It was enough of the truth that it should fly, right? 

Wrong. “Cas. Right. Time for you to go.”

Ezekiel couldn’t believe it. He was actually backing up as a human – an abomination, actually – advanced on him. “I don’t understand. Castiel is your friend.”

“Castiel is Dean’s friend,” the tall man clarified. “He’s a nice enough guy for an angel, I guess. Dean cares about him, and he cares about Dean. He sees me as a tool to get at Dean, as a weapon. You see all that dust? Cas did that. He came damn near killing me, but he couldn’t even finish the job because that wasn’t the point. Having me crazy was more useful for distracting Dean than killing me was. It was more useful to his ‘mission.’ Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he and Dean are so close and I’m worried about him out there the way he is now, but dropping his name isn’t exactly a good way to get me to trust you with my head.”

“I would prefer that your sleep was natural but I can see that it will not be possible tonight,” the angel sighed, and reached out with his grace. There would be no more dreams tonight, only oblivion and stupor.

He carefully wiped up the memory of the conversation and prepared to discard it, which was when he noticed the small steel lockbox in the corner. His grace opened it easily. Inside, he found all of the memories he thought he’d destroyed. He slammed it shut and locked it again. How was this even remotely possible? He took the box and hid it behind several of the Enochian-labeled boxes, contact with which burned his grace. Perhaps taking up residence in the Winchester had not been the best plan after all. Every memory from the time that he’d encountered the brothers was ensconced there, from the encounter when he’d worn Dean’s face to his most recent shutdown of Sam. No memory had ever stayed lost within the young man forever; even Death could not keep them at bay for more than a few months. His situation was only made less precarious by the fact that none of his enemies would look for him in a cambion thing like Sam Winchester. 

The next day he found Dean alone on the shooting range and shut Sam down for a while. “Your brother is in worse shape than I believed,” he explained. “He has nightmares.” 

“Sammy’s always had nightmares,” Dean frowned. “Kid never slept through the night, not once. Why is it a thing now?”

“It impedes his ability to heal, and thus my ability to heal. I attempted to find some happy memories to soothe his mind but he told me that the few that existed have all been twisted by his time in the Cage.” Explaining about the Stanford or Flagstaff memories would serve no purpose other than to sadden Dean, and it was critical that Dean feel very good about what was happening to his brother. Ezekiel therefore kept silent. “I was… startled… by his ability to take control during the dream. He does not love angels, Dean.”

“I guess he wouldn’t, not anymore. What do you mean, take control?”

“When he believed me to be dream-walking he controlled the situation very quickly. He changed things in the dream, created things from nothing; I was concerned for my safety at one point. I would prefer to find a way to soothe his mind without revealing myself to him again.” 

“I don’t know what to tell you, Zeke,” Dean sighed. “There was a time when I could have told you anything about that kid, anything at all. I guess it’s been a long time since we’ve talked about much besides a case. I’ve tried a few times but he kind of … Kid’s an eel, man.”

Ezekiel nodded. He didn’t think that Sam was in fact an eel; he thought he was a part-demon creature crafted to contain one of the most powerful archangels ever. Humans were prone to using metaphor, however. “Indeed. Perhaps another tactic. Have you tried pharmaceuticals?” 

“Yes. It just makes it harder for him to wake himself from the nightmares. And with you in there I’m not sure how that would affect… you know…” 

“I will consider. I have an idea.” 

That night, in the midst of another nightmare – this time involving Sam and Dean engaging in fisticuffs in a motel while a recorded voice of Dean reminded the man of his monstrous nature – Ezekiel once again intervened. “Hello, Sam,” he said. He’d transported them to a hallway in front of a door not unlike that belonging to the storage room, although this one had a darkened, smoked-glass window on it. It also had a biohazard label. “My name is Ezekiel.”

“Right. Angel, healing, friend of Castiel. Got it. I thought I told you I didn’t want you in my dreams?” Dark eyebrows knit together and the blood disappeared from his clothes, hands and mouth. 

“I didn’t think you would remember our conversation from last night,” he hazarded, stepping back. “You should not.”

“I’m full of surprises. What do you want?”

“I thought we might try another tactic tonight. It is imperative that you heal, Sam.” 

“It really isn’t.” He glanced at the door. “Seriously? You want to check this place out?”

“You are surprised?”

“Entertained, in an irritated sort of way. Go ahead.”

“I cannot open the door without you.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, but the door opened at a touch.

The first thing Ezekiel noticed was the creak of the hinges, as though it had been years since they had been used. The second was how difficult it was to move. The floor was covered with a thick but light material, almost like snow, that reached to his knees. The third was the darkness. No light penetrated. “I cannot see, Sam,” he pointed out.

“What, your grace can’t light the way?” A single naked bulb appeared, suspended from the ceiling, and Ezekiel felt what he strongly suspected to be bile rise in his throat. “Happy now?” 

“It’s ash,” the angel whispered. “Everything in here is ash.”

“To the last atom.” Sam leaned against the door frame.

“I thought if we used some of your hopes or fantasies we could craft some pleasant dreams for you,” he continued. “I realize that this is not how your brain typically works but I thought that perhaps together we might be able to correct that deficiency. But… how long has this been true, Sam?” 

“Does it matter? They’re gone. They’ve been gone for a while and let’s face it, they were kind of ridiculous. Are we done here? This room gives me the creeps.” He gestured and they were back outside the storeroom to his memories. “I need to wake up. I need a shower.”

Ezekiel had never viewed his vessels as anything other than tools and Sam Winchester was no different – he was lower even than most mud monkeys, after all, tainted and disgraced. In that moment, though, the angel did feel some stirrings of compassion. He washed the man’s memory and allowed him to wake and wash his body before knocking him out again. He had one more idea he could try. He sent out the tiniest tendrils of his grace through the ground, into the surrounding countryside.

The next night Sam fought sleep for as long as he could, but Ezekiel encouraged him back to his bed. Before a nightmare could even start the angel intervened and began playing a memory. There was an Easter egg hunt, tiny chubby fingers poking at plastic eggs filled with jellybeans under bushes. The next night he played back a different memory, a young girl’s first dance recital and the applause she’d basked in. He focused on how beautiful she’d felt in her costume, how delightful the giggles of her friends had sounded when mingled with her own. The night after that he played back an old man’s memory of seeing his bride walk down the aisle for the first time, concentrating on the awe and love that he still felt for the woman beside him fifty-three years later. 

Sam did not wake screaming, so he had to consider that a win. He got the requisite amount of sleep and then some. Ezekiel managed to keep the dreams perfectly pleasant and absent of the slightest hint of trauma or pain or criticism. The angel remained confused, however. Despite the improvement in sleep patterns his vessel’s emotional state gave every appearance of deteriorating. His appetite dropped off enough that even Kevin noticed and Crowley began offering to do alterations on his clothing – “I’ve still got it, Moose.” And despite the dreams that even Ezekiel felt were pleasant Sam’s pillow was soaked with tears every morning.


End file.
